Richard wright black boy discussion question

INTRODUCTION

Although RICHARD WRIGHT: BLACK BOY focuses mainly on the life and history of an internationally acclaimed American author, the visual and audio components of the documentary richly contextualize the literature that Wright produced. In that sense, the documentary synthesizes a great amount of historical, social and cultural information about the twentieth century. It can be used to prompt extensive discussions, to stimulate students to undertake special research projects, to write papers or combine the arts and/or cultural knowledge into a learning experience.

Since the documentary is ninety minutes in length, planning and scheduling viewing time for students is essential so that the documentary can be viewed in either one or two class periods.

Teachers are encouraged to view and discuss the documentary together and decide whether it is more efficient to use it in teaching one discipline or if students might profit more from discussions that are not discipline bound.

The Teacher's Guide is designed for those teachers who want to use RICHARD WRIGHT: BLACK BOY to enhance the experiences of their students as they explore many and various school subjects.

The guide is not designed to be exhaustive. It provides ideas for student activities and assignments, bibliographies of Wright's work, and a selected listing of background sources. Some older materials are included to suggest the state of scholarship and thinking about issues within Wright's lifetime or as reminders of what works might have influenced his thinking. In making assignments, it is suggested that the teacher add current articles and books that are deemed appropriate.

The pre-viewing questions and activities are designed to help students gain background knowledge. The post-viewing student assignments focus on ways Wright's works mentioned in the documentary can be used to

1. In one of his first contacts with whites, Wright feels himself tensing up with confusion and suspicion over how to act. Discuss the various forms that tension takes in the course of Black Boy. Does Wright glimpse any relief from this tension?

2. Personal narratives like Zora Neale Hurston's "How It Feels to Be Colored Me," and James Baldwin's Notes of a Native Son have been among the most enduring and powerful modes of expression among African-American writers. What is it about the African-American experience that makes so many gifted writers tell their own stories? What influence has Black Boy had on this genre?

3. Wright writes: "I used to mull over the strange absence of real kindness in Negroes, how unstable was our tenderness, how lacking in genuine passion we were, how void of great hope, how timid our joy, how bare our traditions, how hollow our memories, how lacking we were in those intangible sentiments that bind man to man, and how shallow was even our despair." Taken out of context, this reads like a terrible damnation of the African-American soul. How does the meaning of these words change when read in the context of the book - and the context of Wright's own youth? Do you feel the book justifies this criticism of African-Americans - or is this passage a sign of Wright's self-hatred, his lack of sympathy with the essence of black culture?

4. When it was published in , Black Boy was read primarily as an attack on the violence and oppression of the Jim Crow South; during the s, critics began to focus on the sensibility of the narrator - how his experiences shaped him, how he found his voice and satisfied his yearning for expression. Which view of the novel feels most on target to you?

5. Several years before he died, Wright wrote, "I declare unabashedly that I like and even cherish the state of abandonment and alonenessit seems the natural, inevitable condition

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